There is no such thing as magic
If we're honest the reason that Snowflake has a market sector is [1] Hadoop based databases are still very primitive (not significantly different from the Huston Automatic Spooling Progam of the 1960's), [2] Licence price of traditional RDBMS are very high.
There is no magic, Snowflake is not especially different from DATAllegro which sharded data across commodity servers in a previous generation, but unlike DATAllegro it runs in the cloud where it must compete with the cloud vendors own products and cover the rental charge of servers. While it has a high valuation it can invest in marketing and technology to optimise (caching, distribution, query plan, serialisation) for specific use-cases.. but eventually economics will catch-up with them: The question whether they can lock-in customers before the prices drops for alternatives.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
